Nottingham Post and university consortium win local TV franchise

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A consortium including the Nottingham Post and Nottingham Trent University has been awarded the franchise to launch a local TV station in Nottingham.

The Notts TV consortium intends to broadcast seven days a week from April 2014 and plans to make use of “editorial and sales resources at the Nottingham Post”.

The station has said it plans to be “journalism led” with “ a broad agenda, covering politics, business, sport, consumer news, the arts, human interest stories, weather and travel”. There will be 24 minutes of news a day.

The news team for the station will be based at Nottingham Trent University and the advertising team are to be based at the offices of the Nottingham Post.

Inclusive Digital’s chief executive is former ITV News editor Nigel Dacre, who is also a director of Notts TV.

Notts TV is the sixth out of 20 local TV franchises to be awarded by Ofcom following 57 applications.

There was one other licence application in Nottingham – Television Nottingham. The rival bid was headed up by former ITV regional newsrooms editor Steve Lambden and also had involvement from ultra-local video news pioneer Michael Rosenblaum.

Last month Archant won the franchise to run a TV station in Norwich called Mustard and network applicant Made In TV was awarded the franchises for Bristol and Cardiff. Latest TV has been awarded the Brighton local TV franchise and Lincolnshire Living, based at the Grimsby Insitute, has won the licence to run a local TV station in Grimsby.

The new channels are to broadcast on Freeview channel 8 and will collectively benefit from £5m of subsidy over each of the first three years of broadcasting taken from the BBC licence fee. A further £25m of licence fee funding will help pay for establishing the transmitter network.